A follower of politics since we first were free of the nest, we watched Meet the Press quite a bit during the tenure of Mr Russert, and more religiously in these days of DVRs and Video Podcasts. There are political reporters, and then there are Political Reporters. Mr Russert was, obviously afforded the stature of the latter.

Qualifying what made him a giant among men is difficult. Was it his ability to pierce through the noise and accurately predict where the wind was blowing? Was it his ability to moderate a discussion between two sides that would rather scream and throw furniture at each other?

These things were part of what made him great, but Rook’s favorite quality of Mr Russert was a quick, saavy mind that allowed him to interview politicians and make them squirm when they were asked questions they never saw coming exposing their lies and half truths, and his ability to expose them for who they truly were for all the world to see.

The world needs more Political Reporters like Mr Russert, and sadly, Rook doesn’t see many even approaching his stature out there on the landscape today.

Mr Russert, you will be missed.

If you don’t know what Facebook is, well, we congratulate you on a life well lived and direct you to return to the book you’ve been reading. You’re a happier person than us for your naivete no doubt.

“Rook!” our friends say “You’ll never believe what Person A wrote on my Facebook wall!”

“Oh, I don’t know about that.” Rook is likely to reply.

“They wrote that they smelled their fingers after they pooped!”

“How… compelling.”

Rook has no problem with crazy birds who smell themselves after they’ve pooped. Rook has no problem with writing about it on the internet, either. Why, when we were a younger bird, we used to write about… no, no, you’ll be getting none of that. You’d have to have known us then. It was glorious, we tell you.

You might think Rook has an issue with the useless ‘Apps’ that populate Facebook. No, no, they’re fine. Sometimes, they even do useful things, like importing shared items from another service or allow friend to see your Calendar of upcoming appointments, which is no doubt a thrilling way to have your girlfriends feel closer to you when you’re getting that cyst checked out on Thursday morning. It’ll even import your twitter feed so you can talk about how violated you feel after they do the ultrasound.

Rook prefers the vampire game, anyway. He just loves biting people while they’re at the Doctor.

Rook’s real issue with Facebook is that it produces very little usable data.

Before Facebook and it’s hairier, uglier big brother MySpace showed up on the scene, RSS was the hot buzzword. RSS was great, because RSS gave you the data from your friends Blog, or LiveJournal, or Flickr, and packaged it up in a format that you could reuse elsewhere, programatically. What this meant was I could build a customized portal with all my friends feeds right there, or more often, I could use a service like Google Reader or BlogLines to follow my friends. Didn’t matter if they were on LiveJournal, or Blogger, or Xanga, or had their own blog on their website.

RSS delivered the web at the users’s feet, or at least where it was told to be delivered.

Facebook will read RSS feeds if you want it to. Its got 4 or 5 applications (AT LEAST!) for dealing with RSS feeds. But it’s very stingy with its data. Getting most of it out requires programming chops, unless someone’s done it for you already — and good luck, because Facebook Apps have one purpose: to keep the user on Facebook.

So Rook will stay in our little RSS universe enveloped by Google Reader, and our RSS feeds, and allow the vampires to bite each other without us. Left behind, and glad to be there.

You can go back to smelling your fingers now.

Ubik was written by Philip K Dick, who also wrote the basis for Blade Runner, Minority Report, Paycheck, and A Scanner Darkly. (Rook only links the ones worth seeing.) If you know anything about these movies, you know that Dick’s writing is … explorative, to say the least. Ubik is perhaps one of his most ‘out there’ works, and making a movie from it will be a monumental task, to say the least.

Rook hopes for the best, and perhaps a Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said movie.

We were never a big fan of Bill Clinton, but he was consistently better than the alternatives, and had the added advantage of not screwing things up too badly. He pandered a bit too much for Rook’s tastes, but he knew how the game of politics was played — and that was why he managed to keep himself in office, despite himself.

Hillary Clinton is no different, and perhaps a bit shrewder because of her experience with Bill’s campaigns. This is why I find the news reports today of Hillary “vowing to press on” after yet another night of the probability she can pull this rabbit out of her hat slipping away.

Maybe too much of his thinking is influenced by Robert Anton Wilson and the X-files, but Rook has suspected something for a few weeks that seems to be gaining popularity out there in the wider world: She’s running to destroy Obama, so she can face off against McCain in 2012.

It’s an audacious plan. It’s a diabolic plan, and if somehow it succeeds, Hillary Clinton will go down as one of the shrewdest politicans in decades, up there with Richard Nixon. She’s safe, as a Senator from New York, until at least 2012, and probably beyond. She’ll remain in the public eye all this time, with the perfect platform to criticize President McCain (or, one could also imagine, President Obama) and regain momentum for a run in 2012.

Perhaps we’re paranoid, but Hillary has eaten, breathed, and slept politics for over 30 years — and she is not ready to quit, even with taking back the White House for the Democrats.

Rook hopes he’s wrong.

Cutting back on the use of biofuels is being heralded by some, but the real impact of the fuel crisis on food prices is still debated.

If there’s anything worth cawing about, we’ll poke our beak in and make a post.

You might wonder where Rook is going with this. Rook spends our days working like many of you at an unextraordinary job where things are done by computers which we direct by pecking away at a keyboard. Sometimes, certain tasks can only be one by the computers when ‘load’ is low — we have rant here, about incompetents being in charge of processing capacity, but we’ll spare you it, dear reader — and one of these tasks will soon fall upon Rook and our fellows to perform it regularly, meaning Rook had to be at his job for training at the very early hour of 7, when he’s normally not even out of the nest by then.

Now, if you were Rook, I can tell you what would upset him even more than having to get up at this early hour — getting up and being at work on schedule, early, when all he wants to do is crawl back into his nest and be told the training is canceled. We nearly flew the coop right then, we did.

It’s enough to make you want to peck someone’s eyes out!

In Haiti, riots have repeatedly broken out, and there are some casualties. Probably the most serious casualty has been the Haitian Government itself. I assume there are no desperate men at the top of the government with some Ice 9 ready to go for all our sakes.

Egypt had it’s own share of riots too, replete with tear gassing the crowds. An important thing to keep in mind with Egypt is a very restrictive society - they’re quite likely to try and make you disappear if you’re doing anything they don’t like, so this sort of mass action is without precedent.

Technical Note: We are still trying to bend WordPress to our avian will, so expect things to be in flux. We won’t bore you by talking blogger shop as so many of the magpies that clog the internet.

If that was the case, we would have had a post to share with you last Friday. Go on. Look. You won’t find a post dated for April 11th, 2008, though we did write one.

Rook was uninspired, tired, and under a work deadline. “But we can write, by God!” Rook said. “We have a couple ideas from our conversations last week! We’ll use the one that seems to have the most mass appeal! It will be like stealing carcass from a sparrow!”

And write Rook did! It was on topic. It was timely. It was…

It was, and we hang our beak in shame at this, six hundred words of literary roadkill that not even the hungriest of crows would peck at. Forced, uninspired, and unfunny.

Rook still plans to have something for you to read every Friday morning, but we hope that the lesson “We cannot begin writing Friday’s post on Friday.” sets itself in a prominent place in our tiny avian brain.

Generally we are agreeable to such benign news, as we often find ourselves carriers of more serious omens and portents, but the ever increasing numbers said to us by the friendly staff at the local donut shop sting us profoundly. The first component of this venom is the hour. We are not a morning bird, so we’re not receptive to news at all before say, 10 or 11 o’clock, and bad news is doubly hurtful. The second component of the venom is the purchase at hand, the delicious and evenly roasted beans which are the source of our sole chemical addition, the seductive mistress caffeine. The War on Drugs might not have declared our particular drug of choice an enemy combatant and created scarcity, but we understand why some might be inclined to peck out the eyes of their friends in order to steal their nest egg and afford the fine powders and herbs that they have grown to depend on.

The rising cost of our dark, caffeine filled drink is related to the rising cost of another dark and bitter fluid that is known for both its addictive and unhealthy qualities — crude oil — and while those of us who nest here in the northern reaches of the Americas might come to expect it for ourselves in these trying times, there are cries of anguish coming from a few surprising perches in the world, Arab nations without oil resources.

Rook was a ravenous devourer of History class at our time in the Rookery, but with western culture’s focus on the haves and being a ‘haver’, to the detriment of coverage of the have-nots and do-not-wants, every Arab was born with an oil well to his name and never worried for money as far as we were concerned. Well, at least until the realities of the wider world were heard with two loud bangs on the shores of America and we were forced to make some reconnaissance flights over these countries we had always assumed were filled with cruel but wise viziers who knew the value of keeping Rooks, Albatross, Cruise Missiles, and other omen bearers at bay.

So while we may not have consciously realized our pain is similar, though vastly smaller, to a pain felt around the world, we can certainly understand why they’re becoming agitated and that this could cause unrest and more of the same violent behavior that made us so aware of their corner of the world the last decade. To those who might turn their oil-bereft eyes to the west in hopes of gaining revenge, we suggest avoiding this path, as we do not see much benefit to you or your hatchlings in this, because, obviously, you still don’t have oil. While we may have invaded and attempted to improve the lot of Iraqis, this was a move made to ultimately benefit Americans as the gas pump — eventually — if everything goes right. You would likely just be on the receiving end of cruise missiles until they run out.

“You are such a pessimist, Rook!” You might say. “We invaded Afghanistan! They don’t have oil.”

Rook actually has an Honorary PhD in Pessimism, awarded by the Ilium Institute of Cranial Abuse for our lifelong love of pessimism as both an art and science, and we tell you as a learned scholar there was something more … disturbing behind the invasion and nation building experiments in Afghanistan, and it all begins with the Wizard of Oz.

Turn your mind back to the middle of 2002. The Taliban and Al-Qaeda had been pushed back to the deep mountains where they had launched their attacks on the Soviets from in the 80s, and relative pockets of peace and safety existed for a time in the weary nation. Under cover of night, an armada of U.S. Military helicopters descends on one of the numerous fields of opium poppies that grow so insistently in the region, carrying some of the most important people on earth: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld.

Their military guard, trained to kill and to survive tortures that would break the will of others, was uncomfortable. It wasn’t about the enormity of their passengers value to possible enemies, or the disaster that could befall our nation if they crashed — no, it was the outfits these men of enormous power were wearing as they stepped out onto the plane and re-enacted one of George Bush’s favorite scenes from the Wizard of Oz, the Poppy Field Scene.

We’d bombed and invaded Afghanistan for something the supposedly free press of America will never tell you about, though rumors are still spoken of in hushed voices at times of this unspeakable moment in human history — it wasn’t Bush, Cheney, Powell, and Rumsfeld who stepped out of that plane and frolicked among the poppies in the moonlight. It was Dorothy, Tin Man, Cowardly Lion, and Scarecrow.

I’m told some of their escort from that night still wake up screaming.